A Closer Look at RIAA's Sales Numbers

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C|Net has posted a chart today from the RIAA that gives you sales figures for the different music formats over the last seven years. The chart looks incomplete to me, do you see the percentage of money made from lawsuits on there anywhere? :D
 
I like how all the colors can be clearly distiguished. :p

The thing about it is...the music industry is making more money than ever, but the RIAA is making less. Kind of shows them that they suck.
 
1.) That's because it costs more to hire lawyers than the income garnered from the lawsuits they pursue :p

2.) WTF Are "Kiosk" and "Digital Performance Royalties" ?

3.) Its amazing how huge CD sales are, and how absent CD singles are. This was a push throughout the 90. release fewer and fewer singles, so that people are forced to pay for a full album with 10 tracks of filler they don't want to hear.

The traditional record label industry can't die fast enough.
 
looks to me like they need to start making some decent music again. the quality of music these days is just totally degraded, and I don't mean the recording quality.
 
Zarathustra[H];1037496600 said:
2.) WTF Are "Kiosk" and "Digital Performance Royalties" ?

Digital Performance Royalties are things like internet radio and "digital" stuff. "kiosk, I have less idea... this? :confused:
 
looks to me like they need to start making some decent music again. the quality of music these days is just totally degraded, and I don't mean the recording quality.
....oh, the recording quality sucks pretty bad, too....:p
 
Looks like the mass-exodus from CD is slowing and hopefully plateau'ing. I'll be pissed the day I'm forced to settle with 192/256kbps .mp3 garbage.
 
That essentially looks about right if it's raw sales numbers. Those don't take in account production costs, and making CDs en-masse is expensive. I'd imagine that a net-profit chart would actually show growth, and the artists and producers I know tell me that their profits are up the last few years because of iTunes. It's pretty awesome not having to undersell yourself to a label just to get your music out.

What I would love to see is a graph showing how much more profitable it is to release music electronically than it is to have to sell your soul to a record label contract. And then some actual net profits.

All in all, another deliberately misleading chart from the RIAA. You know that's going to be used as a slide in some display about the "affects of piracy". It's nowhere near GAAP, so I'd take it with a bulk-sized box of salt from Costco.
 
Could it be they put out one too many lousy records?!

Something to mention is that if you buy two good songs off a album the total sales is $2, in the past you had to buy the whole album at $15 to get those two songs even if the rest of the songs suck. This is why revenue is down, you can see single downloads grew every year.
 
....oh, the recording quality sucks pretty bad, too....:p

The biggest problem is that someone somewhere figured out that whatever is loud onthe radio sells more copies. So now every single release is optimized for "loudness".

Usually the recording quality is decent (often even over-produced to the point of being sterile) but then ruined at the end of the process by an audio engineer who compresses the sound so that it produces a near uniform 96% volume throughout the album, thus ruining the dynamic range and producing terrible artifacts in the sound, not to mention the reduction in sound quality as you have limited your resolution by squeezing all the data into the same compressed volume range.

(this is not the same as file compression which is separate. Compression here refers to compressing the volume, so that it is squeezed together at the samevolume level throughout the track)

And then - what's worse - are recent dumbass techniques like emulating blown speaker sounds on each bass drum hit so that it "sounds louder". (Whoever came up with this one just needs to be castrated)

Then there is the writing (both music and lyrics) which is abysmal. Either so cliche it hurts or so derivative it drives you insane and it's written by a independent song writer who has nothing to do with the artist or band.

(I refuse to listen to any music where there are 3rd party writing credits)
 
Notice how it is titled "units shipped". Isn't this usually the amount produced and shipped to retailers, etc?

It's a pretty graph, but it does not tell us exactly what it is a graph of, sadly.
 
Zarathustra[H];1037496754 said:
The biggest problem is that someone somewhere figured out that whatever is loud onthe radio sells more copies. So now every single release is optimized for "loudness".

Usually the recording quality is decent (often even over-produced to the point of being sterile) but then ruined at the end of the process by an audio engineer who compresses the sound so that it produces a near uniform 96% volume throughout the album, thus ruining the dynamic range and producing terrible artifacts in the sound, not to mention the reduction in sound quality as you have limited your resolution by squeezing all the data into the same compressed volume range.

(this is not the same as file compression which is separate. Compression here refers to compressing the volume, so that it is squeezed together at the samevolume level throughout the track)

And then - what's worse - are recent dumbass techniques like emulating blown speaker sounds on each bass drum hit so that it "sounds louder". (Whoever came up with this one just needs to be castrated)

Then there is the writing (both music and lyrics) which is abysmal. Either so cliche it hurts or so derivative it drives you insane and it's written by a independent song writer who has nothing to do with the artist or band.

(I refuse to listen to any music where there are 3rd party writing credits)

It is a shame for sure. I'm an adiophile and it's a real pisser seeing a lot of these newly remastered albums of ole going this direction, not just the new garbeage that's coming out.

There are still a few artists that "get-it" and don't clip their remasters to death, but it's getting fewer and fewer.
 
It is a shame for sure. I'm an adiophile and it's a real pisser seeing a lot of these newly remastered albums of ole going this direction, not just the new garbeage that's coming out.

There are still a few artists that "get-it" and don't clip their remasters to death, but it's getting fewer and fewer.
I'm going to date myself, but the truth is I used to build recording studios for a living. Back in the golden days of analog.

You haven't heard audio until you've heard a modified Neumann U87 mic through an Avalon pre-amp. Better yet, a vintage Neve or Trident board that's been modified. No digital nonsense or "enhancements". Give me a Studer that's pulling 2" analog tape at 30 IPS, any day. Reverb? How about an EMT plate reverb. Yes, a real plate. Folks used to really care about recording quality, really used to strive to produce a great sounding album, to outdo their competition. Doesn't happen anymore....they are "good enough" and that's that. You can argue that ProTools and the like were the death of high quality recordings. Not that the tools are evil, but because they make it so easy to get 90% of the way there. Folks just don't care about that last 10% anymore.

Virtually all modern popular recordings are optimized for radio and headphone listening.....because that's how folks listen anymore. While it may not be a huge part of the reason that sales are down, I believe there is still a portion of the music listener that really cares about recording quality.
 
Looks like the mass-exodus from CD is slowing and hopefully plateau'ing. I'll be pissed the day I'm forced to settle with 192/256kbps .mp3 garbage.

As long as its VBR 192/256 really isn't bad. Even with good headphones a good amp and a good DAC, you are unlikely to tell the difference between this and the CD source.
 
Looks like the mass-exodus from CD is slowing and hopefully plateau'ing. I'll be pissed the day I'm forced to settle with 192/256kbps .mp3 garbage.

Luckily iTunes is 256kbps AAC for the most part.
 
So there is a 40% decline in income over the last 7 years. Studies show 20% of that decline is due to piracy. Which is 20% of 40% = 8% loss of total profits to piracy.

For this insignificant amount we are subjected to onerous invasions of our privacy and an errosion of our free speech rights.

Hardly seems like a fair exchange :confused:
 
The digital downloads are increasing and have a much higher profit margin.

Dear, RIAA

STFU!
 
LOL @ Steve's lawsuit/revenue comment.

Zarathustra[H];1037496901 said:
As long as its VBR 192/256 really isn't bad. Even with good headphones a good amp and a good DAC, you are unlikely to tell the difference between this and the CD source.
Yes, I agree. Maybe very high end speakers, and one can tell the difference, but even then, doubtful if the MP3 is at the full rate of 320 kbps.
 
looks to me like they need to start making some decent music again. the quality of music these days is just totally degraded, and I don't mean the recording quality.

There is a lot of stuff out that I enjoy. But I also MAINLY listen to dubstep, techno, electronic music...with some rock thrown in there.
 
This doesn't seem to match up with iTunes sales... Haven't itunes sales boomed in the last 2-3 year?

The graph only seems to show a marginal increase in those areas.

Personally I think the music industry is getting what they asked for, they push singles on the radio and adds, now people only buy singles for a $1.
 
"Only pay for what you can hear" was always good advice when shopping for new equipment and can be applied to today's music as well. The standard mp3 isn't good enough for lots of us - we can hear the lack of quality (in many wasy)! So, if you can "hear the low quality", why would you buy? Maybe this factor is impacting music sales, too.

Zarathustra[H];1037496901 said:
As long as its VBR 192/256 really isn't bad. Even with good headphones a good amp and a good DAC, you are unlikely to tell the difference between this and the CD source.
 
There is a lot of stuff out that I enjoy. But I also MAINLY listen to dubstep, techno, electronic music...with some rock thrown in there.

There used to be a lot of stuff I liked. I still like a lot older stuff I used to listen to, but the much of new stuff out lately just sounds homogenized. There's no real emotion to it, no real feeling. How can I sympathize with the singer if the singer doesn't express feeling?

Well, there are some I can still enjoy: Brad Paisley and Zac Brown Band are very good for that. (Toes is a good one to listen to if you want to get away from reality for a little bit.) Taylor Swift has some pretty good stuff, but I find it hard, as a 40 year old male, to sympathize to much with a 21 year old girl. (She is really still more of a girl than a woman.) However, her "Better than Revenge" is pretty amusing. :) At least these artists have decent production staff.
 
Virtually all modern popular recordings are optimized for radio and headphone listening.....because that's how folks listen anymore.

I think you mean earbuds.

There is a huge difference between a good set of audiophile cans and those pesky little white earbuds that come with the Apple product du jour.

High end headphones - IMHO - provide the best listening experience, better even than audiophile speakers.

Personally I use a set of 300 ohm Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro's.

Not the best by any means, but I really like them. They provide the best sound quality of pretty much anything else I have been exposed to (though they were a bit sibilant before broken in)
 
LOL @ Steve's lawsuit/revenue comment.


Yes, I agree. Maybe very high end speakers, and one can tell the difference, but even then, doubtful if the MP3 is at the full rate of 320 kbps.

Just no. I'm pretty certain the average person is capable of distinguishing the difference. What they don't know is what to listen for. On top of that what you listen to also makes a difference. But with a pair of $90 headphones, and cheap realtek AC97 integrated audio, even with the system induced noise, I can score over 85% right on ABX tests of a variety of music/genres. LAME does the best encoding wise IMO, but mp3 uses one band to compress both high and low frequency info into. Any track that has a lot of info or detail in both the low and high frequencies leaves artifacts you don't need any kind of special hearing or exceptional equipment to discern. Heck, moving to about $500 of home stereo dropped it only to about 70%. Still far better than guessing.

If you are fine with your MP3s, I suggest not trying to discern artifacts, because like seeing the rainbows with DLP tvs, once you figure out how to discern them you can't really stop, and it's annoying as hell. But I have taught a couple of real life friends to hear the artifacts, but they were especially aggressive about claiming I was full of shit, and they deserve what they got. Now bad MP3s (which is pretty much all of them) annoy them too.

Most newer codecs use a high frequency stream and low frequency stream, and even if you have good hearing and listen carefully, there's usually a point on the quality settings curve where it gets very hard to tell for a majority of music for a given individual.

It isn't about high end speakers, it's about listening carefully. Most of the time, what someone who says you won't notice stuff unless you have high end gear actually means is that they don't notice. 90% of the time what that really means is that they don't generally actually LISTEN to their music, but use it more as background filler. Which is fine, there's no point worrying about codecs if that's how you enjoy your music, but claiming there's nothing to support claims to the contrary is just BS.
 
Just no. I'm pretty certain the average person is capable of distinguishing the difference. What they don't know is what to listen for. On top of that what you listen to also makes a difference. But with a pair of $90 headphones, and cheap realtek AC97 integrated audio, even with the system induced noise, I can score over 85% right on ABX tests of a variety of music/genres. LAME does the best encoding wise IMO, but mp3 uses one band to compress both high and low frequency info into. Any track that has a lot of info or detail in both the low and high frequencies leaves artifacts you don't need any kind of special hearing or exceptional equipment to discern. Heck, moving to about $500 of home stereo dropped it only to about 70%. Still far better than guessing.

If you are fine with your MP3s, I suggest not trying to discern artifacts, because like seeing the rainbows with DLP tvs, once you figure out how to discern them you can't really stop, and it's annoying as hell. But I have taught a couple of real life friends to hear the artifacts, but they were especially aggressive about claiming I was full of shit, and they deserve what they got. Now bad MP3s (which is pretty much all of them) annoy them too.

Most newer codecs use a high frequency stream and low frequency stream, and even if you have good hearing and listen carefully, there's usually a point on the quality settings curve where it gets very hard to tell for a majority of music for a given individual.

It isn't about high end speakers, it's about listening carefully. Most of the time, what someone who says you won't notice stuff unless you have high end gear actually means is that they don't notice. 90% of the time what that really means is that they don't generally actually LISTEN to their music, but use it more as background filler. Which is fine, there's no point worrying about codecs if that's how you enjoy your music, but claiming there's nothing to support claims to the contrary is just BS.

which brings about the statement:


audiophilles listen to the equipment, not the music :D



(not a real jab at ya, man :p).
 
"Only pay for what you can hear" was always good advice when shopping for new equipment and can be applied to today's music as well. The standard mp3 isn't good enough for lots of us - we can hear the lack of quality (in many wasy)! So, if you can "hear the low quality", why would you buy? Maybe this factor is impacting music sales, too.

HydrogenAudio.org did a double blind side by side study a few years ago, in which high end audiophiles with expensive equipment compared two flac files side by side.

One was a direct flac from a CD. One was compressed first to a VBR mp3 using lame's "alt-preset standard" and then extracted to a flac file. (as I recall, alt-preset standard is essentially a 192kbps VBR mp3)

The audiophile population were asked to - on their own high end equipment - listen to the files side by side and say which one they thought was the mp3.

The results showed that audiophile listeners were right only about 50% of the time (or about as often as they would be right if it were left up to chance).

Now, I don't know how lames "alt-preset standard" compares to commercially available downloads, but the conclusion was that for MP3's compressed using good settings, like the "alt-preset standard" even highly attuned listeners focusing on trying to pick out the artifacting could not do so.

This - in turn - suggests that a lot of complaints about artifacts in mp3's compressed using good settings (not those shitty warez scene 128kbit CBR rips encoded using Xing) are actually caused by placebo effect rather than the listener actually being able to tell the difference.

The part I can't speak to (as I have never downloaded a song from a pay-to-download service as I always buy the physical CD and then rip it myself using CD paranoia and compress using lame, I find FLAC a huge waste of space) is how good the settings are in the compression on these download services.
 
For my part, if there was some music I liked being released I would have bought the CD. It has only been the last year that I have found anything worth listening to twice.
 
To me, this graph shows that once downloadable singles were a viable option, people stopped being gouged by CD prices and stopped buying a whole CD for one or two good songs.
 
Just no. I'm pretty certain the average person is capable of distinguishing the difference. What they don't know is what to listen for. On top of that what you listen to also makes a difference. But with a pair of $90 headphones, and cheap realtek AC97 integrated audio, even with the system induced noise, I can score over 85% right on ABX tests of a variety of music/genres. LAME does the best encoding wise IMO, but mp3 uses one band to compress both high and low frequency info into. Any track that has a lot of info or detail in both the low and high frequencies leaves artifacts you don't need any kind of special hearing or exceptional equipment to discern. Heck, moving to about $500 of home stereo dropped it only to about 70%. Still far better than guessing.

If you are fine with your MP3s, I suggest not trying to discern artifacts, because like seeing the rainbows with DLP tvs, once you figure out how to discern them you can't really stop, and it's annoying as hell. But I have taught a couple of real life friends to hear the artifacts, but they were especially aggressive about claiming I was full of shit, and they deserve what they got. Now bad MP3s (which is pretty much all of them) annoy them too.

Most newer codecs use a high frequency stream and low frequency stream, and even if you have good hearing and listen carefully, there's usually a point on the quality settings curve where it gets very hard to tell for a majority of music for a given individual.

It isn't about high end speakers, it's about listening carefully. Most of the time, what someone who says you won't notice stuff unless you have high end gear actually means is that they don't notice. 90% of the time what that really means is that they don't generally actually LISTEN to their music, but use it more as background filler. Which is fine, there's no point worrying about codecs if that's how you enjoy your music, but claiming there's nothing to support claims to the contrary is just BS.

Good post and +1.

Looks like this has already turned into a .mp3 merits debate, so too late to go back.

I'm convinced some folks don't have the ability to hear the differences. That's why they are so convinced the ones of us that can are FOS. I like expensive audio equipment, but it really shows the good and unfortunately, the bad of recordings. I've done A/B comparisons on even WMA Lossless ripped tracks against 320's and easily heard spatial differences in the upper range, to the point where I started ripping quite a few different songs in both and was able to distinguish the two, every time. It's the high end for me - cymbals, upper vocals are where the difference can be heard. The mp3's - even the 320's just sound flat in comparison, for lack of a better word, or compressed.

If you can't tell the difference, your ears don't hear all the ranges, you haven't trained yourself to really listen, you don't care or your equipment isn't as revealing as the higher end stuff.
 
To add to the above since I can't edit my post, I will say LAME's enconding I DO use in certain situations as it is definitely the best there is that I have found.
 
Art is not an industry and people are finally figuring out that fact. People are spending money only on things they need. The movie and music industries were doomed to collapse from the beginning. Art is a hobby, not a career. You also don't need to go to school to be an artist. This creates the garbage we are subject to today, people who think they deserve to get paid for their art, and it's sucky art. You are either artistic or you aren't. You can't be taught to be artistic by vapid yuppie professors. Art becomes everyone's once it's released. Art usually affects everyone's else lives but the artist's. Copyright means nothing to me about piracy, only about plagiarism. People should be protected from someone claiming else's work as their own. Art is worthless until the artist dies. Then there is the technical quality that is going downhill...which no one cares about because everyone is brain-dead anymore.
 
Good post and +1.

Looks like this has already turned into a .mp3 merits debate, so too late to go back.

I'm convinced some folks don't have the ability to hear the differences. That's why they are so convinced the ones of us that can are FOS.

I have a decent case of tinitus and a some frequency deafness and can tell the difference between 16 bit linear encodings and many forms of compression. I don't begrudge anyone enjoying their music as background filler. I just wish mp3 hadn't set the bar for music downloads. I love the form factor, I just can't stand spending the money on something that sounds like ass.
 
Something to mention is that if you buy two good songs off a album the total sales is $2, in the past you had to buy the whole album at $15 to get those two songs even if the rest of the songs suck. This is why revenue is down, you can see single downloads grew every year.

This x10000.
 
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